Maria Shriver's new organization has put out a report detailing how one in three American women are living on the brink of economic ruin and David Gregory wants to make sure she knows this is about men too.
January 12, 2014

It's a horrifying statistic. One in three American women live on the brink of economic ruin.

Forty-two million women, and the 28 million children who depend on them, are living one single incident—a doctor’s bill, a late paycheck, or a broken-down car—away from economic ruin. Women make up nearly two-thirds of minimum-wage workers, the vast majority of whom receive no paid sick days. This is at a time when women earn most of the college and advanced degrees in this country, make most of the consumer spending decisions by far, and are more than half of the nation’s voters.

There's no excuse for this in the wealthiest nation in the world. None. This should be the top story on every single news show, not Chris Christie's petty thug tactics (a New Jersey politician playing hardball, color me surprised!).

But even on the the network that put Maria Shriver on the payroll couldn't help ignoring that we are failing Americans. That the economic instability that dominates female-headed households affects the larger economy and even more importantly, our collective future because of all the children in single-parent homes impacted.

But wealthy David Gregory--who will never need to worry about if he'll fall into poverty if his car breaks down--doesn't want to talk about this as far as women goes, even though that's the focus of the Shriver Report. No, no, no...let's talk about how this insecurity for women affects men:

The report itself is so interesting. I’ve been going through it and it’s such a great resource and interesting read at different levels. You have Lebron James paying tribute to his mom, a single mother, a rock of stability for him and his later success. The role of men here is interesting because there are a lot of single moms you’re talking about in this book, but men as caregivers has got to be part of this conversation.

Good god, can you possibly step out of white male privilege for two seconds, you miserable excuse of a hack (Deborah Turness, you're letting him stay on the air), and not process this very serious critique of the failure of American social safety nets through an anomalous millionaire basketball superstar and the relatively small percentage of male caregivers? Bitch, it's not all about you.

Shriver does her best to placate the ruffled male privilege of David Gregory and redirect the focus back to her report (and the recommendations to combat this level of insecurity) but I have to give her the biggest kudos for smacking down the Villager framing Gregory started the segment with:

GREGORY: You heard Marco Rubio. There’s obviously a debate. Conservatives want to get more into the discussion of dealing with poverty even as they renounce the War on Poverty from Lyndon Johnson a failure. Where does government play a role?

SHRIVER: I would like to correct that. The War on Poverty was not a failure. Daddy (Sargent Shriver) ran the program. Many of those programs still exist today. When the War on Poverty was funded, it was a success. When the money was diverted to the war in Vietnam, it lost its momentum. But programs like Head Start, Vista, Job Corps, legal services for the poor, the people that benefitted from those programs, I don’t think, think it was a failure.

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